Gabija Grušaitė (born 1987) is the most prominent millennial voice in Lithuania. She was raised in Vilnius but left to study in London. Her first novel Neišsipildymas (Unfulfilled, 2010) deals mostly with that experience but already aims to speak for the whole generation of “Soviet-millennials”, the first ones to experience the freedom of Western culture after decades of oppression. She later spent a few years in South-East Asia engaged in various social and arts projects, and that experience seems to have influenced her second novel, Stasys Šaltoka (Mr. Colder, 2017). While some might find the ample use of personal experiences in her novels a bit too obvious, it seems to work out fine for Gabija, who has definitely become one of the coolest icons of the Instagram generation.

Stasys Šaltoka (Mr. Colder). Vilnius: Lapas, 2017. – 276 pp.

On the morning of his 29th birthday, Stasys Šaltoka wakes up next to a woman whose name he doesn’t know. He feels the need to shake things up, so he travels to South-East Asia. He meets other people like himself, twenty- and thirty-somethings who put a lot of effort into looking good on Instagram, but in reality struggle with basic questions like what the f*** they should do with their life. They don’t find a convincing answer, in spite of various exciting stuff they try. While many critics call the book the manifesto of ‘hipster’, ‘millennial’, ‘Instagram’ nation, in fact the closest comparison might be Generation X by Douglas Copeland – the generation and many of its realities are different, yet the bleak feeling of emptiness is quite the same.

Ukrainian: Крижаний схiд… один рiк iз життя Стаciса Шалтоки. Translated by Larisa Poliakova. Dnipro” Gerda, 2022